A. E. Stallings's Poem 'The Mistake'

The very thing that can ruin my day, is something that my children absolutely love but oh how I hate that little thing. A.E. Stallings poem “The Mistake” is a short poem about the one thing that I absolutely cannot stand, dandelions. The joy that comes with that little puffball of white as you blow those spores into the wind and watch them dance away. How soothing they are to watch, until later when there are more of them than there are of you. Sometimes the smallest things turn out to be the biggest problem. In this poem, the narrator is talking about how they released a dandelion seed into the wind. It was so simple it didn’t even take much effort at all, “just opening up my hand”. Once it was gone there was nothing more to think about it. Until the following spring when the yard was full of dandelions. It was just something so small, nothing really at all just a split second and it was out of the narrator’s control. It wasn’t anything to be concerned with, how much could it really hurt. Then comes the day when
Everyone has plucked a dandelion and blew it in the wind never thinking about the consequences of that action. It is the same with mistakes made in life where it isn’t big or obvious instead it is something small or something that was quick. Later though that small thing comes around again and now you must face it and deal with the problem or it just keeps coming back. The dandelions in the end of the poem “bloomed and closed, and opened up, and blew” The problem didn’t just show up and then go away, instead it continued the ugly cycle of replicating itself. That little white lie that continues to grow until the story is so convoluted that one can’t even remember what the truth really was. That little thing that took on a life of its own, when you didn’t deal with it when you never thought you would deal with it